Four months ago, the Trump administration released the long-delayed 2023 national data on foster care, featured for the first time in a new dashboard displaying far more details than annual reports of yore. At the time, the administration vowed to use the dashboard to get the numbers out in a more timely manner.
It appears they meant it, because the 2024 numbers from the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (AFCARS) were publicly released this week. The new issuance, which for the first time included numbers for several tribes along with the 50 states, Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico, brings the public data closer to present year than it’s been since August of 2020.
The Administration for Children and Families released the new AFCARS data without any public announcement or statement on its content; Youth Services Insider learned of it from Richard Wexler, who writes the NCCPR Blog.
Topline, the new data shows that the number of youth in foster care was down to 328,947 in 2024, a 3% decrease from the previous year and down 23% from the recent peak of 437,000 in 2018. That marks a six-year decline that began before COVID-19 and has now continued well beyond the social isolation measures prompted by the pandemic.
The drop continues to be fueled by a reduction in the amount of entries into foster that offsets a decline in the number of kids actually exiting the system. Entries declined 2% in 2024, and exits slowed by 4%.
A quick note here: According to the dashboard, Washington and Wyoming “did not submit” data for the dashboard in the past two years, so they aren’t included in these comparisons. A Washington official tells Youth Services Insider the state has submitted AFCARS data, but there are “formatting requirements for the data from the files to be visible on the dashboard. Our IT is working on this and our hope is to get 2023 and 2024 data published on the site later in the fall.”
For now, when we compare these recent reports to years previous, Youth Services Insider is just backing those two states out for now.
The unknown variable is what role “hidden foster care” — the shift of physical custody of a child by CPS without the formal legal changes involved with court-approved foster care — plays in this downward trend. How many youth not entering trackable foster care are doing so through this path? Nobody really knows (hence the “hidden” part), but some in Congress and state legislatures are working to find out.
A few other noteworthy trends and numbers that jumped out to us …
Reunification: The percentage of youth exiting foster care to reunify with their parent or caregiver dipped below 50% for the first time since 2017, and reached a new low of 44% in 2023. In 2024, exits to reunification ticked back up to 45%.
Terminations and Adoptions: Last year’s report found that the actions that tend to steer youth into adoptions dropped substantially between 2022 and 2023. The number of children in foster care whose parents’ rights had been terminated dropped 29% in a single year, and the number of kids for whom the stated permanency goal was adoption dropped 23%.
This year’s report shows the trend continuing: youth whose parents’ rights were terminated dropped another 8% to 49,994, and plans for adoption dropped 10% to 70,421.
Actual exits from foster care to adoption have declined significantly as well: down 6% from 2023, and 29% from the historic peak of 66,208 in 2019.
Click here to access the AFCARS dashboard, and here to see the 2024 report as a PDF.
Correction: The article originally reported the decline in foster youth between 2018 and 2024 as 25%. When factoring out Washington and Wyoming from both years, the decline is 23%.
